"Nothing is funny to a college student in November"
Brief thoughts on identity in life's liminal spaces
I’m not in college anymore, but I’m 23 and in this liminal space of sorts where the extension of my studies has left me identity-less in a way that I have not experienced.
This time, two years ago, I was the Student Body President of the college in the town that I’d grown up in. I won every award for leadership, a few for academics (this was not exactly the priority all of the time), and my face is still on website pages and wallpaper-wrapped on a building wall. My identity was deeply rooted in my positionality in that particular context: I was an activist, a leader, and a busybody whether I wanted to be or not, and I felt a confidence in understanding myself this way because it was validated externally constantly.
And then, I packed up my life and moved across the ocean. When people ask me about Ireland, I still don’t really know what to say. This may partly be because the chapter has not been completely wrapped up— I’m soon to go back for graduation and will start new research projects based there in the summer— and may not feel any sort of completeness ever. The thing I tell people, though, is that my year in Ireland was absolutely jarring but maybe a bit liberating because it was spent entirely identity-less.
There were no expectations about who I was or had to be (except maybe with those who understood the pretext of my existence there— the Mitchell scholarship and what that might say about me and the orientation of my year. The narrative, of course, is different than the exact reality, but that is a different blog.) and I had no connections to a sense of urgency or collective identities or ideologies in the ways I had in my own country, in my own community. I remember thinking often, imagining myself looking at my life before from a hyper-zoomed-out lens, how lucky I was to have gotten to invest so deeply in my community at a young age and to feel a sense of ownership in the stakes of my community’s future. What a beautiful sense of belonging that really is.
But there I was in Ireland, and all I had were my studies (which were mind-bogglingly disappointing) and a crap-ton of free time. I spent the year investing in friendship and hobbies, which turned out to be exactly what I really needed but still felt lost at sea in trying to narrativize myself and understand myself in relation to my surroundings.
I moved back to the States a little over three months ago, and I still haven’t wrapped my head around this transition. Sometimes I wake up with the light hitting just the way it did when I’d wake up in Belfast, and I really think, for just a split second, that I am there in my city centre apartment, going to get up and head to the library to meet my friends or run my usual route to Ormeau park or walk to Victoria Square and back just to feel something.
But I am in St. Louis. A city that feels just as unfamiliar as Belfast did around this time of year last year. I am just barely older than I was, but I still am not sure who I am in relation to my surroundings.
I find myself rejecting many of the stereotypes of the lifestyle of a PhD student. For many reasons, I do not want to get caught in having this be my only, or even primary identity. I want to be an academic for work, and I hope that my work will fulfill me and bring me a sense of purpose and joy, but I do not want it to be the only thing that fulfills me.
I am constantly running up against the tensions of cultivating identity around the things that you do, and I’m learning that this is a recipe for burnout, distaste for things you once loved, imposter syndrome, and all the other icky bad feelings that come with adding external pressure to things you really should be doing for yourself and only yourself.
I’m trying to figure out where the boundaries are between things you do for yourself and things you do for or share with others.
I am hesitant to call myself anything that has to do with what I do. Instead, I have been trying to think about who I am in relation to what truly matters to me: community, art, my values, the hope I have for the future— as just a few examples.
Orienting how I think about myself around ideas and principles does something different than orienting myself around things I do. I will have to unpack this at some future point, but for now this is what I’m chewing on.
And in this strange liminal space of orienting to this new home of mine— which I know one day will feel familiar and mushy in the ways that I feel for my bittersweet hometown— I am trying to lean into my identity-less feeling. Because the flip side of this feeling is feeling too defined, too boxed in by the identities you have accepted. And re-narrativizing and reorganizing your life in search of new identities is an Everest to climb in and of itself.
When I started writing this blog, I was thinking about how it feels strange to basically be the same age as everyone around you, but to be in such a different life space, at least in the context of college, versus basically beginning your career (as you are to do in your PhD.) That’s not where this blog has gone, but that is a line of subtext here.
I’m writing this brief reflection as I procrastinate my last assignment for my last class before Thanksgiving break. Things are wrapping up rapidly over here— I’m down to, like, five things left on my school to-list before its all over. My motivation and executive functioning is dwindling, but it’s all coming together, all coming to a close, and there is lots to look forward to.1
I should note that the quote in my title is from a tweet reposted to Instagram, which I laughed at and meant to reference somewhere in this blog, but didn’t get to. Sometimes the blog just has a heart and path of its own and who am I to get in the way of that?